Field of the Art
The disclosure relates to the field of electronic voting, and more particularly to the field of collaborative decision-making by groups of people using voting.
Discussion of the State of the Art
Voting is a common method for aggregating the preferences of a group of people, or the private information of a group of people, in order to produce a collective decision that will affect the entire group. There are numerous types of voting systems; they are most familiar from politics, but voting systems are also used in numerous private organizations, including clubs, universities, and corporations (shareholder voting, voting by boards of directors, voting in teams of employees, etc.). A type of voting is also used in market research, where customers or respondents may be asked to express their preferences about products and services. However, all of these voting systems share a significant flaw. They do not provide respondents the proper means or incentives for expressing the intensity of their preferences.
As a result, voting systems exhibit a wide range of well-known pathologies. Often people with weak preferences can outvote people with strong preferences (known as “tyranny of the majority”). People vote inconsistently, and often become frustrated and give little attention to their choices. For these and other reasons, voting systems frequently produce inaccurate outcomes, which lead to poor decisions by institutions that rely on them.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and various methods for convex or quadratic, or near-quadratic voting in various types of research and voting.